Age at Coresidence, Premarital Cohabitation, and Marriage Dissolution: 1985-2009

Premarital cohabitation and divorce: Support for the “Trial Marriage” Theory?

A number of studies show that premarital cohabitation is associated with an increased risk of subsequent marital dissolution. Some argue that this is a consequence of selection effects and that once these are controlled for premarital cohabitation has no effect on dissolution. We examine the effect of premarital cohabitation on subsequent marital dissolution by using rich retrospective life-his...

Premarital Cohabitation and Marital Dissolution: An Examination of Recent Marriages.

An ongoing question remains for family researchers: Why does a positive association between cohabitation and marital dissolution exist when one of the primary reasons to cohabit is to test relationship compatibility? Drawing on recently collected data from the 2006 - 2008 National Survey of Family Growth, the authors examined whether premarital cohabitation experiences were associated with mari...

Does premarital cohabitation affect the chances of marriage lasting?

Marriage penalties , marriage , and cohabitation

I examine the effect of marriage penalties in the US income tax system on marital status. I construct a simulated instrument that exploits variation in the tax code over time and between US states to deal with potential endogeneity between the marriage penalty a couple faces and their marital status. I find that a $1000 increase in the marriage penalty faced reduces the probability of marriage ...

Personal traits, cohabitation, and marriage.

This study examines how personal traits affect the likelihood of entering into a cohabitating or marital relationship using a competing risk survival model with cohabitation and marriage as competing outcomes. The data are from Waves 1, 3, and 4 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a rich dataset with a large sample of young adults (N=9835). A personal traits index is constr...